


i know how to cut a wound that will not heal

by calcelmo



Category: Fight Club (1999)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Dissociative Identity Disorder, F/M, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, POV First Person, Past Child Abuse, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Spoilers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:28:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26267992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calcelmo/pseuds/calcelmo
Summary: “Being with you is like being resuscitated,” she whispers against my mouth, serpentine and slutty. Another gem to hoard.I then realize that for Marla, I am better than support groups. I am fractured into pieces and she is sweeping glass off the floor, feeding off my weakness. The worst part is that I don’t mind. I like pity; it’s like a drug to me.Set post-movie. Tags are very important for this one.
Relationships: Narrator/Marla Singer, Tyler Durden/Marla Singer, Tyler Durden/Narrator
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10





	i know how to cut a wound that will not heal

**Author's Note:**

> I once said I wouldn't write anything in first person but I obviously had to break that rule for this fandom. This movie means a lot to me, and especially the way it touches on dissociation/fractured identity. The relationship between Marla and the Narrator is a rare feat of "heterosexuality that isn't wildly misogynistic, twee, or lacking in depth". So I had to write something for them. Please comment, I'm no longer above begging! <3
> 
> P.S. I'm going through a Crystal Castles phase right now. Title is from Pap Smear.

I have to come out and say that I am honestly a little scared of Marla. I’m scared of what she wants from me. If she thinks I can fuck her the way Tyler did, she's dead wrong. Sex for me has always been… strange. 

I can't even remember doing it. I think that’s because if I did, I’d be borrowing her Xanax. 

"What happened to you?" Marla asks me. It's so much less abrasive than her usual tone. My eyes avoid hers reflexively, and I guess that tells her everything. I feel angry, but I can't pinpoint why. 

Real sympathy isn’t as rewarding as the false sympathy I’m used to. 

Her fingers touch mine, and she takes my hand. She thumbs gently over the ugly, raised scar from the chemical burn Tyler gave me. That I gave myself. Sometimes I miss him so much, I hurt myself to feel like he's still with me. Last week it was boiling water. I threw it over my arm and bit into my wrist to stop myself from crying out. Before that, I spent a half hour breaking the blades out of my razor. 

Marla says, "It's okay. Me too." I'm not surprised, and I'm not reassured. I don't like the way that broken people find their way into each other's arms like magnets, because that means I'm visibly broken. And not in the cool, busted-lip kind of way. 

I ask her if it’s obvious.  _ Only to people like us, _ she tells me. 

“Well, actually,” I say, because the romance makes me deeply uncomfortable. “I think people can tell because of this,” I indicate the ragged scar on my cheek. “And you fit in with those support groups because you looked like you  _ were _ dying.” With those dead eyes, sunken cheeks, you might even consider for a second that she _did_ somehow have testicular cancer or whatever the fuck we emotional vultures were feeding on that night.

She’s a spitting ball of rage, classic borderline, and my immediate backtracking costs me some emotional vulnerability. “No. You’re very beautiful. I just meant…”

Her eyes soften, and she kind of smirks. “Hold it right there.”

I frown, and look away. Sometimes I wonder if she knows how much I need her, because I never say it, and I pretend that I’m doing  _ her _ a favor by allowing her to stay with me. I remember how I hated her, and how quickly that hatred turned itself inside out. 

“Hey,” she says. Her nails are razor sharp against my jaw. I hold her gaze despite how much my skin burns. “You’re beautiful too.”

I laugh, one of those hollow and humorless sounds. I don’t try to argue, because I know she believes it, in the same way I believe that scars and broken bones and disfigurement are desirable. I don’t know why I do it; but I do know that I can’t stop. 

"Tell me what happened,” she sighs against my neck. She backs me onto the bed, and I let her sit on my lap in a way that’s uncomfortably, inappropriately paternal. 

I don’t say anything for a while. My hands are absently combing through the wild mess of her hair like I would for my daughter. 

I will never have children.

I’m wondering where to start and how to fill the gaps in my memories. Then Marla murmurs, “Who was it?” and then I can’t stop myself from spilling everything I've had bottled for so many years I could probably enter the beverage industry. 

While I struggle, she touches me. Like everything in my life, it starts with good intentions, and quickly snowballs into something neither of us can control. I’m harder than I’ve ever been, harder than I was when Tyler put a gun in my mouth.

This is becoming a Pavlovian experiment with potentially devastating effects, but I figure I can't fuck myself up anymore than I already have. I'm talking in raspy, stuttered little sentences, and Marla is listening, enraptured, but she's got one hand pressing into a line of cuts on my arm, and the other one cupping my balls. 

I pull her closer, like a safety blanket. My whole body’s trembling like a fawn. "I'm trying to stay with you," I admit, "but it's hard. I feel like-" 

My breath catches. Her hands on me feel unimaginably better than mine ever could. Under her palm, my cock twitches, and I'm long past the point of coherent thought.

She leans up to kiss me, slipping her tongue in my mouth. She tastes like the vodka we had to drink to be able to get to this point; a free ticket to Traumaland. A ride that never ends.

I cup her breasts. I can't imagine being rough in the way she's told me Tyler was. She's always so close to breaking, and I feel as much as if  _ I'm _ handling fragile china as she must do with me. 

The kiss gets dirty and messy, chasing the last trace of vodka down her throat. Her hips grind up against me, her skirt riding up and my cock pressing against her pale, scarred thighs. 

“Being with you is like being resuscitated,” she whispers against my mouth, serpentine and slutty. Another gem to hoard. 

I then realize that for Marla, I am better than support groups. I am fractured into pieces and she is sweeping glass off the floor, feeding off my weakness. The worst part is that I don’t mind. I like pity; it’s like a drug to me. 

It’s not as if I can be left alone. If there's no one around to hurt me, I'll hurt myself until there's nothing left. Ash; bones.

Marla moves off me for a second while she gets a condom out of the drawer. Without her weight pressed on top of me, I feel panicked and breathless. I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I ever did this with her, so well that she called me  _ good in bed. _

We did ecstasy, just this one time, just to take it off the bucket list. I cried a lot. Marla told me she loved me while she fucked her dildo up my ass. Yeah, that was a weird fucking night. But I tried to tell her there were things I couldn’t remember doing, because it wasn’t really me doing them. I told her my name wasn’t even Tyler, but if she wanted to keep saying it, that was fine. Part of me didn’t want to forget that there ever was Tyler. 

“Then whose name is it?” 

I couldn’t begin to explain. I thought about Tyler and how I was supposed to put into words who he is. What he is. What he  _ was.  _ I can’t believe he’s gone, and all that’s left is residue in my synapses; fat and blood and lye.

She still calls me Tyler.

Marla rolls the condom down over my dick, and leans forward to sink her teeth into my neck while she guides me into her pussy. This is one of the only things I live for. The pleasure of it, the intimacy of it.

She says, “Fuck, your cock is so big I can feel it in the back of my throat,” and I say, “Marla please- please don’t fucking say that.” Then we’re laughing, and I hate it, because I don’t really feel like a man right now. I’m supposed to be taking care of her and making her scream and cum, but I feel like I’m separate from my body, and I’m looking down on two very sick people trying to get off to very sick things. 

She wraps her hand around my neck, and we have the kind of sex that child abuse victims have, and I fall asleep while she's running her fingers over all the bruises and scars I've collected. Then when we wake up, she brings me coffee in bed, and tells me, "We’re going to get tested for STDs."

I wince. The armchair psychologist laying dormant within me holds up his clipboard and writes in a scrawl that looks suspiciously like ‘intimacy issues’. I don’t know. Something about being seen as a couple just makes my skin crawl. 

“Is that really necessary?” I ask weakly.

“If you want to get the full experience,” she smirks. She climbs in right next to me, pulling the comforter up over her legs and deliberately poking me with her freezing cold toes. The domesticity of it manages to irk me and comfort me at the same time. I live in contradictions, so I reluctantly wrap an arm around her.. 

She looks so at home. I feel like I’m an old man, and this is a glimpse into the future. 

“What I meant was, is it necessary for me to go  _ with _ you.”

When I talk, I can hear the nasty, catty edge to my voice. I don’t like it. Marla pulls out of my grasp and fixes me with this baleful stare, the one she gave me back in the laundrette when we were scrapping over support groups like two real fucking lunatics. Jesus, that was a lifetime ago. I suddenly feel guilty for accusing her of what I just accused her of. 

I know I’m just being an asshole. And I guess I do want to know what it’s like without a condom. 

I set my jaw and nod minutely. She smiles. All her smiles come with a disclaimer- ‘I’m not  _ really _ happy right now’- but I admit, I still think she's beautiful. 


End file.
